WHO WE ARE:

We engage in intersectional feminist politics grounded within our communities, including those whose backgrounds encompass East, Southeast, and South Asian, Pacific Islander, multi-ethnic and diasporic Asian identities. Through public events and resources, we seek to provide spaces for identity exploration, political education, community building, and advocacy.

Asian American feminism is a world-building project. The beauty of the Asian American feminist movement is that we can continue to shape and evolve it. We must constantly reflect upon and refine a political agenda that works for all of us. Our goal is to continue interrogating and defining this movement as well as producing different spaces and resources to build stronger coalitions, connect people in the Asian American community, and produce new ideas.

CURRENT LEADERSHIP COMMITTEE:

Leadership

Julie Ae Kim (she/her) is a Queens raised community organizer and writer. She works in local politics and focuses on issues of gender, immigration, and Asian America. She served as one of the lead organizers in the initial Asian American Feminism event series.Twitter:@julieaekim

Rachel Kuo (she/her) is a scholar and educator teaching and writing about digital technology and racial justice. She is currently a PhD candidate at NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and part of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies. Twitter: @rachelkuo

Senti Sojwal(she/her) is an India born, NYC-bred reproductive justice advocate and feminist organizer. She currently works at Planned Parenthood of New York City, runs the Feministing Five interviews column, and is pursuing her MPH in women's and reproductive health at NYU. Twitter: @senti_narwal.

Tiffany Diane Tso (she/her) is a freelance journalist and producer. Her writing focuses on topics surrounding culture, identity, art and advocacy. She has been published in Slate, Refinery29, Feministing and more. Twitter: @tiffanydian

Get involved with us: We're looking for folks to reach out with projects they’re interested in spearheading or contribute to ongoing projects. Email us at aafcollective@gmail.com.

WHAT WE DO:

Community Building: We bring people together! We create spaces for people to connect, build, and support one another. We also collaborate with other local and national organizations, groups, and movements to bring together people with aligned values and interests.

Public and Political Education: Grounding Asian American feminism in our present political moment, we create public events and programs across a range of formats that engage political issues facing our communities through a feminist lens. Our events seek to foster dialogue that explore the intersections of Asian/American identity with issues of social justice and also cultivate social change. We draw on the expertise and experiences of those in our community by hosting intentional spaces for dialogue and discussion as well as organizing panels and performances with community leaders, organizers, artists, scholars, writers, and policymakers.

WHAT WE BELIEVE:

Asian/American feminism is an ever-evolving practice that seeks to address the multi-dimensional ways Asian/American people confront systems of power at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, disability, migration history and citizenship and immigration status. We are indebted to ways Black feminist thought and Third World feminist movements enable us to think and act critically through our own positionalities to address systems of anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, and xenophobia.

OUR HISTORY

In the groundswell of feminist resistance that launched the Women’s March and Strike in January 2017, we yet again saw the exclusion and tokenization of women of color. It became imperative to revive Asian American feminism and activism to ensure political resistance also adequately represented the needs of Asian American women and girls and marginalized genders.

A group of organizers, scholars, artists and writers in New York City came together to create an event series about Asian American feminism focused on intersectional feminist practices for political action. Topics included Asian American feminist politics, histories, and organizing frameworks.

The inaugural leadership committee, Julie, Rachel, Senti and Tiffany, connected through the building of this series and decided to start the Asian American Feminist Collective (AAFC) to focus on building a movement in New York City that focused on using community building and political education towards coalitional and transnational organizing from a feminist lens. AAFC is possible because of the collective work of multiple people in sharing ideas, time, and labor. We officially launched the collective in 2018 and are continuing to learn, build and grow.

Photo by Marion Aguas

WHY ASIAN AMERICAN FEMINISM?

We urgently need intersectional frameworks and practices for political action. Rather than demand inclusion into mainstream feminism, Asian American feminism offers a platform for sharing narratives and histories that speak to different intersections.

We are moved to action from our histories: from our family histories and why we migrated to the US; from knowing histories of US exclusion, because we were seen as prostitutes, as filthy, as vagrants, as spoils of war, as enemy combatants, as terrorists; from everyday moments of racism and sexism where anger rests in our bodies until we reach a tipping point. Because we bring our histories to feminism, an Asian American feminist movement allows us to draw upon our own lived experiences, material conditions, and historical contexts to move beyond narrow bids for national political and economic inclusion and instead push for radical and alternative pathways to justice.